Appointment setting systems are commonly used by large companies to maintain control over the scheduling of appointments for resources such as service calls by repair personnel. Unfortunately, many such appointment setting systems are paper-based and prone to over-commitment of resources. For example, such systems often permit the entry of appointments for the same time and/or for the same service personnel. Moreover, such systems often fail to account for changes in resources, such as unexpected absence of service personnel.
Appointment setting for a service technician pool (technician network) provides a good example for the purposes of this discussion, because service technician network appointment setting is so well known for over-commitment problems. In the conventional appointment setting system, a group of people, collectively referred to as a filter, is used to maintain the schedules of available service technicians in a technician network.
A customer needing a service technician will contact an appointment setter (appointment negotiator) to arrange for a service appointment. The negotiator will obtain information from the customer to prepare a service order. The service order can include material such as the appointment time preference, the service task desired, and the location of the desired appointment. This information can be passed to the filter in the form of a service order. The filter will compare the service order information with the technician network capacity to determine whether the service order can be fulfilled by the technician network.
The filter maintains one or more lists of the technicians available for each particular day. When the listed capacity is exhausted, the filter rejects service orders received from an appointment setter and notifies the appointment negotiator that the service order must be rejected. The appointment negotiator must then contact the customer and attempt to arrange an alternate time.
Because more than one person operates as the filter, however, the potential for overbooking always exists, because one filter personnel may not know when another filter personnel has committed the last of a limited resource. Accordingly, it is commonplace that technicians are overbooked in such an appointment setting system.
Overbooking technicians requires the appointment negotiators to contact the customer and reschedule an appointment. This is an expensive use of the time of the appointment negotiator personnel. Rescheduling service technician appointments is usually inconvenient for the customer and is, therefore, to be avoided. Often, overbooking will simply result in the failure of a technician to meet the appointment, despite the fact that the customer is waiting for the technician. This can happen when insufficient time exists before the appointment time for the appointment negotiator to contact the customer and reschedule. In many states, regulated industries are required to reimburse customers for missed service appointments. In any case, missed and rescheduled service appointments are inefficient and harmful to a company's good will.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for an appointment setting system that minimizes missed appointments and rescheduled appointments. The appointment setting system should provide real-time information pertaining to the capacity of a technician network and should minimize the time between a change in technical capacity and the notification of that change to the appointment negotiator. The system should also process service orders in sequence, thereby reducing the potential for overbooking.